International Morphological Processing Conference (MoProc)

Compound processing in semantic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia

Jun 24, 2017, 10:50 AM

1h 55m

SISSA Park (SISSA Main Campus)

Poster Freely Contributed Paper Poster 2 (with coffee)

Speaker

Christina Manouilidou (University of Ljubljana)

Description

We investigated the production and lexical access of compounds in the semantic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA-s), a language impairment caused by neurodegenerative disease and characterized by word meaning breakdown in absence of grammatical difficulties (Mesulam, 2013). While inflectional & derivational morphology has been examined in PPA-s (e.g. Auclair-Ouellet, 2015), compounding has not been explored yet. Our goal is to present data of how the degraded semantic system in PPA-s affects compound processing. Participants: Two patients diagnosed with PPA-s on the basis of neurological, neuropsychological and neuroimaging data and four healthy elderly controls. Stimulus set: 130 Modern Greek compounds; 70 dependent (e.g., aγrioγata/‘wild cat’), 45 coordinative (e.g., alatopipero/‘salt&pepper’) and 15 exocentric compounds (e.g., kokkinomalis/‘redhead’) from all grammatical categories. Procedure: a) Naming by definition task: participants were given the definition and they had to utter the actual compound. b) Online simple Lexical Decision task. Results: Naming performance of both patients was significantly impaired compared to controls. Their errors were mostly substitutions (e.g., krifovlepo/ ‘secretly see’ instead of krifokitazo/‘secretely look’) and misorderings (e.g., korfovuno/‘topmountain’ instead of vunokorfi/‘mountaintop’). Lexical decision task showed that PPA-s patients responded slower than controls in absence of significant differences in accuracy. Both tasks revealed more difficulties in dependent compounds. Discussion: Compound naming is impaired in PPA-s due to semantic deterioration while knowledge of word structure appears to be relatively preserved. Results further suggest an impeded lexical access. This could be attributed either to a difficulty with processing complex semantic relationships within compounds or to factors related to the semantics of each constituent.